May 23, 2017
By Peter Swire
Technological developments are driving fundamental changes in the importance of cross-border government requests for data. There are multiple institutional mechanisms for possible reform, entirely apart from the traditional approach of Mutual legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs). And the resolution of MLA issues will have broader implications, on whether multiple nations push for strict data localization laws, and for the ongoing debates about government laws to limit strong encryption and to authorize greater government hacking of computers for law enforcement purposes... Read More

May 23, 2017
By Suzanne Vergnolle
The United States and the European Union have remarkably different data protection laws. Privacy laws in the U.S. are sectoral, while the EU takes an omnibus approach. When it comes to access to evidence by law enforcement, the differences between the two systems are even more pronounced... Read More

May 22, 2017
By Scarlet Kim, Greg Nojeim
At the request of the United Kingdom, the U.S. Department of Justice proposed legislation (“U.S. DOJ legislation”) that would permit countries hand-picked by the Department to make direct demands for communications content held by U.S. communications service providers under agreements between the U.S. and the third-party countries... Read More

May 22, 2017
By Andrew Keane Woods
Rather than merely rehash the manygood reasons for reforming the mutual legal assistance regime for the digital era, it is useful to step back and ask if there are any lessons to be learned from current reform efforts. Here are three... Read More

May 22, 2017By Kim Peretti, Justin HemmingsThe ubiquity of data breaches can create a misperception that data breach investigations are routine. In reality, these investigations can be surprisingly complex and are unlike other law enforcement investigations. Most significantly, the interests of law enforcement and victim entities are not always aligned, particularly as investigations progress.... Read More

May 22, 2017
By Dillon Reisman
We cannot have widespread data localization without making web services we rely on technically unviable. To understand why this is the case, we first have to answer a question at the heart of the Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) and cross-border data transfer debate: Where is data located?... Read More